Create a Structured Link-Building Campaign in Five Easy Steps

With machine learning making it more difficult than ever to rank organically, you can’t afford a haphazard approach to link building. Before you launch your next link building campaign, take the time to form a plan. Here are five ways to run a more efficient link building campaign in 2017.

Be a Woman/Man with a Plan

Forming a plan, and sticking to it, improves performance and helps you reach your ranking goals quickly and efficiently. You may be tempted to switch gears at the news of a new update, but don’t let yourself get off track. Veering from your plan will lead to wasted time and resources. Develop a detailed link building plan to maximize your campaign results. Start by determining exactly what you want to accomplish with your link building campaigns, and what steps are required to achieve the desired results.

Find Relevance with Niche Sites

A successful link building campaign starts with relevant links. Rather than attempting to acquire any link that shares relevance with your content, edit your strategy to go after links from a smaller pool of highly relevant websites. Instead of building content around broadly relevant sites, find highly relevant sites you can link to without writing multiple pieces of distinct content. This will reduce your need for unique content creation, and free up resources for other projects.

Create a Process

Jumping from task to task reduces efficiency, and makes it harder to produce results. There’s a reason why assembly lines work so well. Create a process, then document it for your team to reproduce. Start with a strategic goal, then determine the queries you need to rank for to achieve that goal. From there, you can plan your content calendar for the next 12 months – including web pages and blog posts. Next, identify sites you want to earn links from. Lastly, begin outreach attempts, start building relationships, and earn links.

Document Your Progress

This is especially important if you are working as part of a team. It’s important for other team members to know where everyone is in the process to reduce overlap. Be sure to document your link-building campaign where others in your team can view them. There are several tools that can help with this process including Trello, Google Drive and Basecamp.

Leverage Your Contacts

Leverage existing contact to help you form new ones. Use crawlers like Screaming Frog on a contact’s website to identify outbound links, and then sort the data to identify potential link opportunities. Once you have a list of websites in mind, you can reach out to your contact for an introduction. Email outreach works best. This will only work if you have a good relationship with your existing contact. Asking for an introduction from a person you don’t know well, probably isn’t an efficient use of your time.

Link building campaigns can still be an effective way to improve ranking, and earn the traffic you need to generate revenue from your website. Optimize your process to get more from your link building campaigns in 2017.

 

 

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